National Center of Independents and Peasants

The National Center of Independents and Peasants (CNIP) is a liberal-conservative political party in France, founded on 6 January 1949. The party was the leading right-wing party in post-World War II France until 1954, when the military disaster of Dien Bien Phu in French Indochina shattered CNIP's popularity. The party was opposed to communism and was supported by businesses, supporters of colonialism, and agricultural companies, and it supported Charles de Gaulle's comeback in 1958. The party was a member of the Gaullist coalition until 1962, when it was expelled from the alliance for opposing De Gaulle's policy of self-determination for Algeria, his economic interventionism, and the expansion of his presidential power. During the 1980s, CNIP aligned itself as a bridge between the right-wing Rally for the Republic and the Union for French Democracy and the far-right National Front of France. After party president Gilles Bourdouleix declared, "Maybe Hitler hadn't killed enough Romas," on 10 September 2012, the party was kicked out of its center-right electoral coalition. In 2017, it held only one of the National Assembly's 517 seats.